Looking beyond the hematologic advances presented at the 2026 National ICE-T Conference in Orlando, program leadership pointed to the expansion of CAR T-cell therapy into non-oncology indications, such as stiff-person syndrome and myasthenia gravis, as a major topic on the horizon.
Zahra Mahmoudjafari, PharmD, BCOP, FHOPA, MBA, clinical pharmacy manager in the Division of Hematologic Malignancies and Cellular Therapeutics at the University of Kansas Health System and a program director for the ICE-T Conference, spoke with CancerNetwork® about the operational challenges that expansion could bring. The steadily growing proportion of patients who present with conditions like myasthenia gravis, Mahmoudjafari described, may raise questions on how systems will adapt to the influx of patients across hematologic and non-hematologic indications alike. She anticipates leading conversations regarding treatment with these expanded cell therapy-eligible populations within the next 2 years.
Transcript:
CancerNetwork: If you had to predict the biggest topic on the agenda for next year’s ICE-T meeting, what would it be?
We will continue to see significant progress in the non-oncology space. We anticipate an approval in non-oncology for stiff-person syndrome, and maybe myasthenia gravis at some point soon, maybe not in the next 12 months. That will be a real operational challenge, because categorically, the number of patients who have myasthenia gravis, or some of these non-oncology indications, is going to be a lot more. So how will systems adapt to the influx of volume in a completely different patient population?
Up until this point, bispecifics and cellular therapies have primarily been in the blood cancer space, and those patients are naturally very different from someone with a non-oncology primary indication. Maybe it is ambitious to think it will happen in the next 12 months, but certainly in the next 24, I would anticipate that will be some of the conversations we are having.
